A guest post by Steven J. Patrick.
The Narrowing of Mars Hill Church: How Humans Screw Up Theology
When Mars Hill Church started, it was a grand idea: eliminate the window-dressing and ceremony of conventional Protestant churches and embrace aspects of pop culture: rock music, sports, films, and current popular issues. Dress down. Bond as a like-minded brotherhood…what’s not to like?
But, as time went on, with young people today being generally either agnostic or indifferent to religion, the task of finding pastors became a process of Whomever Shows Up. Finding anyone, in any arena of human endeavor, who can speak, be confident, command attention, and maintain at least a facade of logic and rationality, as any HR recruiter will quickly tell you, is like looking for your lost cuff links in a gravel quarry. Those who speak without fear or self-consciousness in front of large groups of people tend to fall into four categories: bosses, con men, actors, and psychopaths. And, on the surface, they all look pretty much the same.
Enter guys like Mark Driscoll; people who have few, if any, real ties to the mores of this generation and a fierce, zealot-like belief in “traditional values”, that code phrase for “Let’s turn the clock back to 1956!” What Driscoll says and preaches is no different at all, in essence, from the old-time religion that Mars Hill claimed to reject. Driscoll’s Seattle area messages to the flocks of the local Mars Hill Churches are really no different from what Jerry Falwell advocated, all those years in Lynchburg, VA – minus his $1000 suits and the White Shoulders spume hovering over the chapel. Having attended and/or watched both those churches and seen them in action, I find it crystal clear that Driscoll is attempting – maybe even subconsciously – to elevate himself to the status of the “New Jerry Falwell”; an effort rooted in the fact that The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Grease. Driscoll appears to have a soul-deep understanding, as Falwell did, that the path to personal stardom as a minister/politician is to say whatever outrageous, controversial thing pops into your head, as long as it produces SOME reaction. THAT is how Liberty Baptist Church grew: Falwell ticked people off with his carny antics and his followers rallied around him, forming an “Us vs. Them” bond against the outside world. Every simple, vaguely-disillusioned person within that area of Virginia who felt that the world was not quite “right” gravitated to his message of Assigning Blame for their ills to something, ANYTHING outside themselves. There’s comfort in the idea that the world is to blame and that this crap in our own heads, that gets us odd looks and confrontations when we verbalize it, is actually Right, while the rest of the world is perverse and ignorant of The Truth.
Anyone who imagined that this new generation of Believers would be any smarter or more evolved than the generations of gullible folks who came before them is simply deluding themselves; indulging their egos with a self-serving view of their peer group as more enlightened than the ones that came before. Average, angry people will ALWAYS find a sympatico group who will tell them that Liberals, pop culture, Brittney Spears, American Idol, Avatar, and the media is to blame for their lot. The real truth – that the problems we ALL deal with are almost always of our own making – is exactly what congregations like Mars Hill has become are designed to avoid.
I saw Rob Bell, one of the founders of the Mars Hill “movement” onstage with the Dalai Lama at Hec Edmondson Pavilion during his last Seattle visit. I was taken by his gentleness and direct ideals and started to look into him and Mars Hill. I watched all of his videos on youtube and admired their style and content and simple, elegant truths. This, I thought, is a wonderful idea: religion which recognizes us and doesn’t judge all us rock ‘n’ roll-era kids and try to tell us that the things we love, the lives we lead, have to be gutted, purged, and reassembled to make room for God. No authoritarian old guys in suits, no fancy robes and collars and surplices, no thees and thous – just people of the generations after Elvis, trying to communally reach toward God. I wrote a previous entry in this very blog, dedicated to the idea that this concept can work, despite the wholesale vilification that Mars Hill was already incurring. I got angry emails from people who told me that I didn’t know what Mars Hill was really all about. And, full of myself as I frequently am, I chalked it all up to the Zeal of the Easily Offended.
I was wrong.
As a Christian, I can state without reservation that what comes out of the three Mars Hill Churches I have visited has NOTHING to do with any God I know. ANYONE who preaches confrontation, division, wholesale disdain, chauvinism, or the superiority of their own Truth has automatically disqualified themselves, in my eyes, as a Christian. There is ONE guiding principle with which NO real Christian can argue:
Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.
Not when it’s convenient, not only when the cameras are rolling, not just when you agree with the other guy. ALWAYS. Mark Driscoll gets, as his followers do, a bit testy when anyone criticizes Mars Hill. But, apparently, as in this latest dust-up over the movie “Avatar” – “the most Satanic movie (Pastor Driscoll) has ever seen” – he feels it’s just fine for him to dump on whomever and whatever he wants. Those who defend him cry that he was only talking to his congregation, that it was a sermon and nothing more. The problem with that reasoning is that Mark Driscoll, for reasons I guess I am not equipped to understand, has Followers – followers who listen to his judgments and then go out among the rest of us and repeat what they heard, use it as a social weapon, and create artificial divisions based on nothing more than the views of one very ambitious, ladder-climbing, normally-imperfect man. I guess, when you’re angling for stardom, as Mark Driscoll certainly appears to be, the rules are supposed to be a little different for you.
Originally published on Seattlepi.com: link
